[USFK Forums] 'Washington will continue to suppress N. Korea [Korea Herald]

[C. Y. Lee]

Uploaded by C. Y. Lee on Thursday, January 19, 2006

'Washington will continue to suppress North Korea'

By Annie I. Bang
The Korea Herald
Publication Date : 2006-01-18

The United States will continue to suppress North Korea, by taking a hard-line policy against various issues including the North's alleged counterfeiting of US currency and its nuclear programme standoff, a Korean public institute said in a report released yesterday (Jan 17).

"The Bush administration has recently raised concerns of North Korea's counterfeiting and circulation of the false currency separate from the nuclear issues. And those various pressures against North Korea are not one-off actions but will continue throughout this year," the government-funded Korea Institute for Defence Analyses said in a report.

The report was written by Kim Chang-su, researcher for the ROK-US Alliance, US security policies at the institute. "At first, there is a greater possibility for the Bush administration's high-ranking officials not to give up their strong attitudes towards North Korea although Washington has insisted that it would adopt the 'conditional engagement' instead of a hard-line policy," Kim wrote.

Since the Bush administration has concerns about North Korea's human rights issues, in relation to both South Korean defectors and the population living in the North, Kim said it will "confidentially" review various ways to reduce the threat from weapons of mass destruction.

To scrap North Korea's nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and promote transparency, the actions of Robert Joseph, senior adviser to US President George W. Bush, are important, Kim said. Joseph is also Secretary of State for Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament.

US Ambassador to Korea Alexander Vershbow also alerted South Koreans yesterday (Jan 17) that people should be worried over the North's regime, which "is wasting its resources developing nuclear weapons and counterfeit bills, drug-dealing and money-laundering to survive."

"The criticism on policies of the North Korean regime by me and other US leaders is because over 23 million Koreans in the North are facing difficulties and pain due to those policies," Vershbow wrote in Korean on the US Embassy's online chat room -- Cafe USA. He criticised North Korea's policies which starved over 1 million people to death.

"Even the survivors go through chronic malnutrition, economic slumps and do not have the freedoms which South Koreans take for granted. Overlooking these is not going to make Korea unification any sooner," he wrote.

Supporting the idea of unification on the peninsula, Vershbow said the United States encourages North Korean people to seek the freedom and prosperity which South Koreans enjoy.

"We hope that North Korean leaders will open their isolated society, carry out and reform into free market economy and respect their people's human rights," he wrote.

"With North Korea abandoning its nuclear programmes, these reforms will help North Korea get out of isolation and make unification on the peninsula more feasible."



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[mike]

This story is excellent but shows a continuing theme: the U.S. appears more concerned about North Koreans than the South Korean government.

Now, I am not naive to think the South Korean government doesn't care about North Koreans. The South Korean government is just more concerned about South Korean citizens and keeping the North Korean government happy. They are working towards a "stable peninsula" policy and not a "peninsula with free citizens."